Patrick White

Background

About Patrick White

Remember dial-up? Imagine you’re on a dial-up connection, and you only have electricity for a couple of hours per day. How would you spend your time online? Four years ago, my answer was clear: I needed to learn to code. I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guinea, where my job was to help reduce stock outages of malaria medication. After spending a month visiting dozens of health workers, we had the solution: short message service, or SMS. The problem? The only thing I knew about SMS was that’s what Europeans called text messages. The delight of seeing text after text roll into our bootstrapped messaging hub only came after many months of reading online documentation, countless hours of debugging, on-site testing, and weeks training health workers in some of the most remote villages in the world. I’m so proud of what we accomplished. Nobody was thinking about using SMS to improve health care services at that time. Yet, we showed it could be done. Our experiences taught me that something can start from nothing, which is a lesson I still live by to this day. Thank you for reading, and please get in touch; I'd love to hear your story. Specialties: listening, javascript, es6, nodejs, ember, ux, user experience, jobs to be done, jtbd, ruby, ruby on rails, sql, postgresql, redis, agile, prototyping, framer, development, ngo, malaria, biochar, peace corps, start-ups, mhealth, mali, guinea, unix, hosting, digital ocean, DNS